Want some Quechup on your Rapleaf?

Update: Robert X. Cringely posted something on Quechup that was very similar to what others have written, but drew a response from a VP at the company, who took issue with some of Cringely’s comments, and the blogger/columnist later posted an update addressing some of these points. The company is…

Robert X. Cringely posted something on Quechup that was very similar to what others have written, but drew a response from a VP at the company, who took issue with some of Cringely’s comments, and the blogger/columnist later posted an update addressing some of these points. The company is apparently working on some changes to its policies.

Original post:

Several different strands of Web 2.0 have come together over the past week or so that I find interesting, in part because of the backlash that seems to be bubbling around the idea of social networks. That backlash has flared up in several places recently — specifically, in the comments about two Web 2.0 services: Quechup.com and Rapleaf.com. The combination of those and other similar controversies has led some to propose a Bill of Rights for social networking. But will that really solve anything?

Quechup is the easiest of the two situations to describe. While I haven’t been affected by it directly because I avoided signing up, the site — which is owned by an online dating venture called iDate.com — appears to spam people without permission, which is a no-no by just about anyone’s definition. When you sign up, it apparently asks for your email and then sucks your address book in and spams everyone you know with an invitation to what it calls “a social networking platform that is sweeping the globe.”

Those with long memories (in Web-time at least) will recall that this is exactly the kind of thing that got Plaxo.com in trouble. It spammed people’s contact lists as well, and a number of people refused to use it as a result. Mike Arrington of TechCrunch in particular swore that he would never use it because of its behaviour, and Plaxo later apologized.

Despite several days worth of blogstorm-style posts — such as Ken Camp’s “Rat bastard disease of the Internet” post — the folks at Quechup don’t seem to care that they have gotten a reputation as the biggest spammers on the Web, to the point where critical blog posts now make up virtually all of the results on the first page of a Google search for the company. Perhaps the iDate service is so lucrative that they couldn’t care less what people think.

What happened with Rapleaf.com is a slightly different story: the company is one of a number of social-network aggregators such as Spock.com, which try to help users find and bring together in one place all of the various profiles and information about them that exists on various sites — and, not coincidentally, tries to sell some of the information about those aggregated profiles to advertisers, through a separate service called Trustfuse.com.

Rapleaf also has a service called Upscoop.com, which allows you to upload a contact list and then see who has profiles on which services or networks. In a nutshell, what Rapleaf did was to email all of those contacts to tell them that you were searching for info about them — something it thought was a valuable service, but now admits was wrong and probably also stupid. It says it will no longer do that in such a spammy kind of way.

The company also mentions in passing the idea of a social networking Bill of Rights, which is something that has also been bubbling up for awhile (as Karoli notes here). In its latest incarnation, Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble have joined forces with Marc Canter and Joe Smarr of — yes, you guessed it, Plaxo — to lay the groundwork for a statement of rights that social-networking users would like to see respected. You can read the whole list here, but it includes things such as control over your personal info and what is done with it, etc.

A valuable statement of principles, perhaps. But will it accomplish anything? Companies like Quechup that don’t care about their users will continue to engage in all kinds of nefarious behaviour, and a Bill of Rights isn’t going to stop them. The only thing users can do is read the terms of service and privacy policy before clicking the “Submit” button (Prokofy Neva has some other concerns with a uniform bill of rights, which she outlines here).

Meanwhile, companies like Rapleaf — which appears to care about its users and its reputation — will respond to the kind of outcry that has taken place without any need for a Bill of Rights (although getting your info removed is far from easy). Don’t like what a company is doing with your data or your profile? Cancel your account and go somewhere else.

Mathew, you read my mind. I am stuck in the Quechup mess – sending nastygrams to company management did not help. I had to delete all my contacts and move it to a new gmail a/c, maybe I should push/harass google to shut access to these morons.

Rapleaf is by far the more unpleasant of these two companies. It acquired my personal data by theft and deceit through the upscoop service and is using this for commercial gain. It created multiple profiles for me without my knowledge or consent. They have disregarded all requests to permanently delete this information. This is in direct contravention of EU and UK data protection and privacy laws.

Ironic that this company claims to be all about reputations and trust on the web.

While the social networking bill of rights might not make that much of an impact, it’s an important thing for people to read. It may also lead to something much more important in the future–we don’t really know. Statements sometimes bring issues to the attention of folks who don’t really know there’s an issue–and can get us to re-think our positions on related issues. So, we are once again in a wait-and-see phase in social networking….

but the whole “lifestream” thing made me itchy when I first heard about it. and it still does. esp. when there is so much hype encouraging so many of us to put up so much of our lives online in an effort at “transaprency.” Perhaps transparency will be, ultimately, a form of transluncency that will echo the way many of our parents and grandparents lived in the offline world.

Where to find me

You can find me on Twitter at @mathewi, on Facebook and on LinkedIn, and I've been known to show up on Google+ from time to time. You can also contact me at mathew at mathewingram dot com and I will do my best to respond

Search

Search for:

Archives

Archives

about me

I'm a Toronto-based writer, and this is where I write about online media, technology and other interesting things I come across on the Web. I am a former senior writer at Gigaom, a former blogger, columnist, reporter and social-media editor at the Globe and Mail and a former writer with the Financial Times of Canada.